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Friday, October 31, 2014

If you've been around a while, you've probably noticed that I'm a little curmudgeonly about holidays and parties and anything that involves interaction with other people. But despite all the things that make me twitch, there's something I always look forward to on Halloween.

Every year we try to do a project, something that we'll remember and care about years down the road, something more than just a cute costume. Last year my three-year-old made it through the entirety of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Dang, I was proud of her. The year before that, my daughter was the star of her own Halloween horror story.

This year, my four-year-old pirate princess takes a Jabberwocky's head for a prize. *

Sunday, October 26, 2014

My daughter's birth marked a landfall after nine long months of a watery existence. Little bit by bit, each additional day she was in the womb, she became a little less fish and a little more mammal.

Sometimes, even four years later, it seems as though she's still trying to make up for her sloshing fetal isolation from terra firma. When she gleefully kicks up the dust beneath her feet, I imagine an ocean-weary mariner whose feet unexpectedly hit dry ground after so many days at sea.

At our local public library, there's a song that the kids sing during story time. It goes,

Each of us is a flower,

growing in life's garden.

Each of us is a flower,

we need the sun and rain.

Sun, shine your warmth on me.

Moon, cool me with your night.

Wind, bring the gentle rain.

Earth, take my roots down deep.

It's one of those cutesy songs that I don't want to admit enjoying. I'd be okay if most nursery rhymes and children's songs faded into obscurity. Yet I can't deny there is not much that is better than watching a bunch of three or four-year-olds perform a choreographed dance while crooning "each of us is a flower . . ."

* * *

There are treasures down there beneath the dirt. Bottlecaps, old nails, crumbling pieces of brick and ancient tile work and pottery. Worn pennies and forgotten plastic bracelets. Little rocks that could be hidden gems and big rocks that could be prehistoric fossils.

"Getting buried," her new favorite activity

As an adult, I too rarely stoop to break the surface of the ground I walk. But now, excavating a moat and castle, I relive my own childhood archaeological adventures. It feels good to sweat through my shirt, to imagine what's under the next layer of earth, to see our mountain grow taller.

And it feels good to have my daughter by my side. She digs with her own pink shovel, inadvertently throwing dirt back into the hole I'm laboring over. She bends to pluck curious objects before they're lost to the settling soil. She scoops handfuls of dirt and rubs them over her skin like some luxurious moisturizer. And when we're done, she's the very best buried treasure a scurvy pirate dad could find.

* * *

Our neighbor, a spry eighty-year-old in a boonie hat and gardening gloves, watches from the back fence.

"What's that yer working on?" he says.

My daughter and I survey our territory, the moat and the castle mound that is currently a temporary home to assorted trucks, dolls, and transplanted flowering weeds.

"Yeah! For fun!" shouts my daughter, emptying a cup of dirt over her head.

"Huh," he says, and turns away, shaking his head.

Alan, our neighbor, is a gardening fiend. He can't wait until we stop foolin' about and start growing things. Which we fully intend. It's on our to-do list. Definitely in our 10-year plan. Living an hour from a reasonably-sized grocery store, it starts to make a lot of sense to grow things ourselves.

But for a little while, we're pretty okay with digging for the sake of digging. With examining roly-poly bugs and watching neat lines of ants trooping along the bottom of our trench. With laying on a pile of dirt and watching the clouds go by. With carving canyons with shovels and kitchen implements and with building tiny civilizations on the cliff edges. With getting so dirty that a shake of our clothes leaves a cloud of dust wafting through the air, and perpetually having dirt under our fingernails, a keepsake and reminder to get outside again soon.

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions . . . mud pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

Thursday, October 23, 2014

Last weekend I ran the Bakersfield 10K Volkslauf for my fifth straight year. I didn't really train much in the "preseason," since we're in the middle of trying to buy a house and, well, because laziness. I almost didn't show on race day, but finally dragged myself to the starting line for the sake of continuity. And because velociraptors. My daughter, enthusiastic about my athletic goals (or lack thereof), has taken it upon herself to help me get back in shape:

She's a tough taskmaster.

I used to try this same maneuver several years back when she was ten or fifteen pounds lighter, and I was ten or fifteen pounds more muscular. If I'm gonna be able to still manage it in several more years, I've obviously got to up my game. It's daunting, but dang-it, I'm gonna make it happen. When I think of a father-daughter obstacle racing team, I can already feel the pre-race butterflies flapping around excitedly in my stomach. Next year, at almost 6, she'll be the perfect age to start.